Test of Time award for 2006 security paper co-authored by Cristian Cadar

Award ceremony at the ACM CCS 2016 in Vienna, Austria (photo by J. Kinder)

Dr Cadar is the co-recipient of the Test of Time award for his high-impact security paper co-authored in 2006.

The paper EXE: Automatically Generating Inputs of Death co-authored by DoC academic Cristian Cadar while a PhD student at Stanford University together with colleagues Vijay Ganesh, Peter Pawlowski, David Dill and Dawson Engler, has received the ACM CCS Test of Time award, which "recognizes works that had significant impact on the [security] field, as seen from a ten-year perspective."

The work was published in one of the top security conferences, the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in 2006. The award was presented at CCS 2016 in Vienna, Austria.

EXE was one of the pioneering papers on dynamic symbolic execution, a technique with applications in software engineering and testing, computer security, software systems andverification, among others.

The paper is studied in several courses at top computer science departments around the world, and has influenced the design of future systems in this area, such as the popular open-source symbolic execution engine KLEE, for which Cristian is also co-author and maintainer.

Cristian's thoughts on the EXE project, 10 years after its inception, can befound in one of his recent blog posts.

Since the EXE paper, Cristian and his team at Imperial College have continued to make further progress in this area, improving the generality and scalability of the approach. Details on their most recent projects can be found on the website of Imperial's Software Reliability Group.